by Usually, the funniest news is in the black hole around the biggest, baddest and most violent vacancies we can imagine. I’m talking about supermassive black holes that contain billions of the mass of the sun; the ones called quasars that eat up the surrounding matter and spit out the excess so aggressively they create light patterns that outshine even the galaxies they inhabit. You know the ones.
However, on Thursday (March 7), scientists released a study that serves as a reminder: Baddie black holes aren’t the only ones worth thinking about. With the help of the trusty James Webb Space Telescope, this team identified a population of these luminous quasars that are not typically massive. They’re massive enough, to be clear, because they’re still supermassive black holes — they’re not to enormous.
Related: The James Webb Space Telescope finds an ‘extremely red’ supermassive black hole growing early in the universe
In short, the reason for this finding is that for a long time scientists have not been sure how some of these quasars reach the massive sizes we observe. We know that massive mind-bending quasars exist, but how, exactly, these quasars earn such mass-mind-bending status is still unclear. Even with the sheer amount of material they soak up, it’s almost like not enough time has passed for them to reach their final form. So, could these newly discovered quasars be transitional behemoths – filling a gap that scientists have long hoped to fill?
“One issue with quasars is that some of them appear to be too massive, too massive given the age of the universe at which the quasars are observed,” Jorryt Mattee, lead author of the study and assistant professor in Austrian Institute of Science and Technology, said i statement. “We call them the ‘problematic quasars’.”
A great mystery
The life of these “problematic quasars” begins with the death of massive stars.
When a supermassive star nears the end of its life, its intrinsic nuclear fusion processes, by which it turns hydrogen into helium, begin to wane. Eventually, such internal fusion stops completely. This is a question for a star trying to fight the death grip. When fusion stops, so does the outward pressure that has been keeping the star stable against the inward pressure of its own gravity for millions, often billions, of years. Ultimately, the star collapses in on itself. It dies an explosive supernova, and a black hole is born.
Then, if this black hole starts actively feeding on the surrounding matter, it will eventually become a big, bad quasar. But, here lies the question. What happens between them?
“If we consider that quasars come from the explosions of massive stars – and that we know their maximum growth rate from the general laws of physics, some of them seem to have grown faster than possible,” a Mattee explained. “It’s like watching a five-year-old child who is 2 metres [6.5 feet] high Something doesn’t add up.”
Aha! That’s where the team’s new medium-sized black hole discovery comes in. These small quasars may represent the missing piece of the problem-quasar timeline.
“Black holes and [supermassive black holes] They are probably the most interesting things in the world. It is difficult to explain why they are there, but they are there. We hope that this work will help us raise one of the biggest mysteries about the world,” said Mattee.
Follow the red dots
Quite cinematically, the researchers say that the JWST recognized the objects – which the team fondly calls “baby quasars” – in the form of several small red dots.
“While the ‘problem quasars’ are blue, extremely bright and reach billions of solar masses, the little red dots are more like ‘baby quasars.’ Their mass is between 10 and 100 million solar masses,” said Mattee. “Also, they appear red because they are dusty. The dust blurs the black holes and reddens the colors,”
It’s also important to note that the team knows that these observed black holes are quasars – that is, they’re actively feeding (or at least doing so) – because of the reddish tint as well . The researchers explain that their targets are emitting what are called “Hα spectral lines” with “broad-line profiles.” These spectral lines, they say, are given when hydrogen atoms are heated; the width of the lines can also trace the movement of the gas. The wider the base of the line, the higher the gas velocity.
“So these spectra tell us that we’re looking at a very small, very fast-moving cloud of gas orbiting a very massive object like [supermassive black hole],” said Matthew.
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The next natural step for the team is to investigate these baby quasars in more detail, trying to truly connect them to their big brother quasars that have been causing a dilemma for scientists’ calculations of black hole ancestry. Even better, though, the team is generally excited about the datasets the JWST captured of the region in space it explored. One of the collaborators behind the data, called EIGER for “Emission-line Stars and Interstellar Gas in the Reionization Era,” wasn’t even designed to find the red dots it was finding. “We found them by chance,” said Mattee.
“If you lift your index finger and extend your hand fully, the region of the night sky we’ve explored is about one-twentieth the surface of your nail. So far, it’s probably only the surface we scratched.”
A paper on the discovery was published in March. 7 in the Astrophysical Journal.
